This presentation by Andreas Kalyvas, NSSR Associate Professor of Politics, focuses on the modern decline of oligarchy as a political concept.

From its ancient beginnings and until the 18th century, the concept enjoyed a relative definitional stability as a form of government and a regime type based on the political centrality of economic power, the social composition of the ruling class, the material interests of legal reason, and the organizing presence of property in the structure of sovereignty. By the early 20th century, however, a noticeable conceptual shift had occurred: the decline of oligarchy as a political category and the loss of its descriptive, diagnostic, and critical uses. Captured by a nascent sociological discipline that subordinated it to the new category of the élites, it disappeared from the modern political lexicon.

This discontinuity in the conceptual history of oligarchy raises several questions that the presentation will address:

—Why and how did oligarchy lose its meaningful place from modern and contemporary political theory at the time it did?

—Why did it vanish when its political meaning appeared to correspond to the material, normative, and symbolic structures of the modern commercial world?

—What accounts for its depoliticization?

—And what does this decline mean for our understanding of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism today?

This event is part of The New School for Social Research's General Seminar event series. Refreshments will be served.

Open to New School community members only. Must have an @newschool.edu email address to register.